


Bait and Switch

by draculard



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Bathing/Washing, Body Horror, Cannibalism, Cooking (People) Together, Hallucinations, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Mild Gore, Murder Husbands, Nightmares, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Psychological Horror, Reality Bending, Scars, Teeth, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Vulnerability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:26:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26470360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: High on Hannibal’s back, between his shoulder blades, Will feels it — the raised, rough edges of the branding scar.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 8
Kudos: 112
Collections: Darkest Night 2020





	Bait and Switch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zipegs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zipegs/gifts).



It seems like every time they kiss, Will tastes blood. He can’t be sure if it’s coming from his own mouth or from Hannibal’s lips; today it’s smeared on both their hands, and it’s coating Hannibal’s face from his nose to his chin. 

His eyes are dark and searing into Will’s, giving no sign of pain. When he speaks, his accent is thick.

“Let’s go home,” he says.

Hannibal’s kills are artful; Will’s are animalistic, and they never bother to clean up the scene when they leave. They let the blood seep into the floorboards behind them. As Hannibal slips out the door, his back turned, Will bends down silently and grabs a red-stained, shattered tooth off the floor. He glances back at the woman they killed, at her fractured jaw, and slips the tooth into his shirt pocket.

They’re only ever intimate in moments like this: after an argument, after a kill, or in the midst of a building tension that one of them might try to kill the other — which isn’t necessarily the same thing as having an argument. 

They step outside, into the isolated night of the countryside, and before Will knows it, Hannibal is pulling him closer, chest-to-chest, his arms wrapped around Will in an embrace. He presses his face into Will’s shoulder, and as always, his touch is firm but gentle, urging Will closer but not forcing him. 

He doesn’t need to force him. Will’s hands rest on Hannibal’s hips, relishing the heat he feels through the fabric of Hannibal’s shirt. It’s come untucked in the back, and instead of fixing it, Will slips his hands inside, letting Hannibal’s fever-hot skin warm his palms. He skims his hands up Hannibal’s back slowly, dragging his blunt fingernails over the broad shoulders and circling back down to drum his fingers over Hannibal’s spine.

High on Hannibal’s back, between his shoulder blades, Will feels it — the raised, rough edges of the branding scar. He’s never seen it; somehow, no matter how many times they change in front of each other, Hannibal always manages to hide it. He always faces Will when he puts a fresh shirt on; he sleeps on his back after sex, or turns on his side facing Will, so Will can’t see.

Maybe it’s a deliberate gesture; maybe it’s not. Will can’t tell, and it seems perhaps a little too optimistic to think Hannibal is capable of feeling self-conscious. He runs the pad of his thumb over the scar, tracing the uneven circle of it, trying to make out from the blurred edges what the Verger family crest looks like.

Hannibal, with his face buried in Will’s shoulder and blood on his lips, takes a sharp breath and tenses beneath Will’s hand. It’s a long moment before he relaxes again, pressing himself closer than before, his fingers tight in Will’s shirt, their hips touching. Will can feel his hip bone digging into Hannibal’s thigh, probably hard enough to bruise. He runs his fingers over the branding scar again.

Hannibal lets it happen.

* * *

He slips out of Hannibal’s arms that night, claiming he needs the bathroom, and then he walks around to the other side of the room and stands in the doorway of the master bath waiting for Hannibal to fall asleep again. It doesn’t take long; Will can see him, his bare arm slung over the empty space where Will had been a moment ago, the blankets pulled up to his chest.

He knows Hannibal’s breathing patterns: the harsh rasps of adrenaline in the middle of a kill; the deep, even breathing when he’s concentrating hard on something; the sharp inhales and exhales that signify a nightmare.

Now, Hannibal’s breathing is shallow but steady, the sound of dreamless sleep. Will approaches the bed silently, on bare feet, and sits on Hannibal’s side of the bed so slowly and so gingerly that the mattress doesn’t dip beneath him. He pulls his legs up and rests his palm against Hannibal’s shoulder, testing the waters.

When nothing happens, he folds the blanket down just enough to see the scar. In the dim light, it’s tough to make out anything other than the uneven edges. The dancing hog in the center of the crest has blurred over time, becoming nothing more than a twisted knot of scar tissue in the center of Hannibal’s back.

Will touches it, trying to feel out the edges, to figure out where the beast’s tusks might have once been. He traces the laurels on either side of it, the details lost to time and scarification. 

What did Hannibal look like? he wonders. Trussed up like a pig, left nude and undignified in a barn stall for hours, with rope around his neck and wrists. He’s heard the description from Alana, but nothing compares to seeing it for himself — and he’ll never have that chance. 

He leans down, pressing his lips against the scar in an open-mouthed kiss. He isn’t soothing the wound.

He’s tasting it.

* * *

The next time he sees it, he’s sitting nude on the edge of the tub while Hannibal bathes, both of them fresh off the kill. This is the first time that Hannibal has allowed Will to bathe him, without insisting they share the shower or tub; it’s the first time he hasn’t blocked Will from seeing his back. 

He leans forward, his head resting on crossed arms, his hair still soft and dry as Will lifts a rough cloth — the kind Hannibal likes, counter-intuitively, because it abrades his skin and makes the washing process sting. He runs it over Hannibal’s shoulders and back, eyeing the branding scar — on display and in good lighting for the very first time.

The edges are crisp and clear. The scar tissue itself is smooth and shinier than the rest of Hannibal’s skin. Every detail of the laurels is still starkly outlined; the dancing hog in the center is so sharply defined the Will can run his fingernail over the edges of its tusks.

It wasn’t like this last time, he knows, or the time before that. Staring at it, he feels a great pressure on the inside of his skull, against his temporal lobe.

“Does it still hurt?” he asks. His voice comes out rough, tumbling over numb lips. Hannibal looks over his shoulder at Will, his face unreadable.

“Scar tissue is less elastic than unharmed flesh,” he says, avoiding the question. “It feels tight.”

Will touches the crown burned into Hannibal’s skin, just above the head of the dancing hog. There’s something uneasy, something off about the brand. It seems mutable, like a living record of something he can’t quite identify. 

Is it even real? he wonders. Or is it all just a show?

He sees an alternate reality, crisp and clear, just for a moment: Hannibal, his self-consciousness around the branding scar utterly feigned; his vulnerability and torture at the hands of Mason Verger staged; his indignity before Alana and Margot nothing but a tongue-in-cheek act. 

Smoke and mirrors, he tells himself. Bait-and-switch.

But he lays his palm flat against the scar tissue and feels warm, breathing flesh, and knows deep in his soul that it must be real.

* * *

They cook together, a little ritual they’ve gotten into after a kill. Together, they glaze the choicest cuts from their victim with balsamic and rosemary. Each thinly-cut strip of meat, when finished, is rolled around fresh vegetables from the garden — long strips of bell pepper, zucchini, and onion, and Hannibal grills them while Will watches, snacking on the leftover vegetables as he waits.

“It’s nice to see you vulnerable,” he says, and then when Hannibal stops to stare at him expectantly, waiting for Will to explain himself, he brushes the soft, unstyled hair out of Hannibal’s eyes and pretends this is all he means. 

When they’re finished, it’s up to Will to plate them. He prepares a plate for Hannibal, and when he’s done — when his back is turned and Hannibal can’t see what he’s doing — he takes a keepsake out of his pocket and tucks it deep inside Hannibal’s food, nestling it among the vegetables, beneath the strips of tender, mouth-watering human flesh.

They eat quietly, neither of them talking. Halfway through his meal, Hannibal takes a bite and stops, a loud crunch making both of them freeze. There’s no expression on Hannibal’s face; he pushes his plate away and wipes his hands on a napkin before he parts his lips. Will gets a glimpse of Hannibal’s tongue, pushing the offending item forward, catching it between his teeth and plucking it out of his own mouth with deft fingers.

It’s a tooth, a human tooth, shattered and torn out at the root. It is still covered in dried blood and dirt from when Will grabbed it off the victim’s hardwood floor.

Hannibal studies it, his face unreadable. He turns it first one way and then another beneath the dining room light. He seems to catalog the bloodstains and the granules of black dirt ground into each fracture along the surface. He scrapes his thumbnail over the enamel.

And then, still expressionless, he meets Will’s eyes.

* * *

That night, the branding scar is different again.

At three in the morning, Will is still awake, and he hears the unmistakable breathing pattern he’s heard a thousand times before — the sharp, quiet inhale that signifies a nightmare. He rolls over, finds Hannibal sleeping on his stomach — an unusual position for him, one that for some reason always seems to bring bad dreams. The woman’s tooth rests under his pillow, still uncleaned, blood and dirt mingling with Hannibal’s dried saliva. 

Sometimes, when Will isn’t looking, he knows Hannibal slips that shattered tooth into his mouth and lets it rest on his tongue, the sharp roots of it stabbing into the roof of his mouth. He stares at Will every time he does it, his eyes burning holes into Will’s back. What he gets out of it — what peculiar flavor or electric charge — Will doesn’t know.

He doesn’t bother to wake Hannibal now, knows there’s no point. Hannibal’s dreams never interrupt his sleep significantly, and never seem to distress him in the morning. Instead, Will takes the opportunity presented to him to slide the blankets away from Hannibal’s bare shoulders and examine the branding scar once again.

He sees the crown, less detailed than it was just a few days before, when Hannibal asked Will to bathe him and wash his hair. He sees the dancing hog, now little more than a misshapen lump in the center of the brand; its edges have elongated, stretching its limbs until they join together with the hardened knot of tissue circling the scar.

The ridges of it seem to respond to Will’s touch, kissing the pads of his fingers as he explores the once-familiar scar. He digs his thumbnail under the edges of it; blood wells up, and the branding scar starts to peel. Like a decal, Will thinks; like a cheap vinyl sticker. 

He grabs a tissue off the bedside table, mops the blood off Hanninal’s skin, and kisses the fresh wound before he goes to sleep. 


End file.
